Hello there. I just wanted to share an idea i have on memorizing the rubics cube for blindfold solving. Many blind solvers use a system where you have to memorize a sequence of letters, and most often you do that by memorizing letter pairs.
It is possible to come up with the images
on the fly, but i feel that to get faster you should go with predetermined images.
The challenge is that there is a lot of letter combinations, and it takes much effort and time coming up with, and remembering, images for every combination of letter pairs. [a-x][a-x].
Today i tried to create a simple rubics PAO, and it worked out really really well (for me anyway):
For every letter, choose one person, one action and one object starting with that letter. Then use it as a regular PAO-system. To memorise ADK, you use person A (Adam) doing action D (dancing) to/with object K (key) - Adam dancing with a giant key - and store that in a locus or building it into a story.
I know there are other (and faster ways) but for me this worked out really well. Hope it could help others as well
What is your favorite ways of memorising the letters when you blind solve?
If I have to solve just 1 Rubik’s cube blindfolded.
Edges => letters combination, Like AA => AAm (mango)
And then put it in a memory palace, mostly I place images in my surroundings where I am solving Rubik’s cube.
Corners => audio memorizing , without any letters changing I just keep repeating the letters like singing.
you can say your method is => Pao
AA , AB, AC, AD… XX => 3 digit system.
For solving many cubes blindfolding.
Just remove the Audio memorizing part, I will place images in a memory palace for corners too.
Hi @vidar-s. I appreciate this approach to make memorizing BLD more efficient by encoding single letters in PAO. The challenge is combining the triplets of PAO with the pairs in execution.
For example, if using OP/M2, for certain letters in the M slice, one would memorize or execute an inverse algorithm for the second letter in a pair. Memorizing letter pairs, it’s always clear which is the second letter in a pair. However, if you’re memorizing PAO, then the second letter in the memo would be an Action on the first cycle, a Person and an Object on the second cycle.
Also, memorizing pairs also brings clarity when managing parity, where you would have an odd number of letters—or a “remainder” if memorizing pairs. With a PAO system, it would be more challenging to tell whether a scramble contains an odd number of letters. You could end a memo with a complete PAO set which could include an even number of pairs (PAOPAO, e.g.) or an odd number (PAOPAOPAO).
This would also hold true for more advanced 3 cycle execution which always executes a pair together with a buffer.
For 3BLD, as speed advances, you might move from memorization and encoding to audio for some or all of the execution. For bigBLD or multiBLD, developing a full set of PAO for each letter pair can be really helpful to encode more information with fewer duplicate images. As you note, it’s a lot of effort to put together a 550+ pair PAO!
